Episode #236 - Real Werewolves?

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There's a story that there was once a king named Lycaon from the Greek region of Arcadia.

Lycaon was a vicious and bloodthirsty ruler who had earned a reputation for cruelty.

He had passed this love for violence on to his many sons, who had become well known for sadistically tormenting the people of Arcadia for sport.

Before long, tales of King Lycaon's depravity reached the ears of the gods on Olympus, and so Zeus, king of the gods, took it upon himself to investigate the situation.

Disguising himself as a traveler, Zeus set out on a walking tour of Arcadia to see just how bad things had become in the kingdom.

The Roman poet Ovid, who provides us with the most famous version of this tale, relates the events from the perspective of the god himself.

Ovid's Zeus disgustedly reports that, quote, it would take too long to tell of the wickedness I found in Arcadia.

The rumors were even milder than the truth, end quote.

After taking stock of Lycaon's misrule, Zeus then headed directly for the king's palace.

When he arrived, the god did not play coy.

Instead, he announced immediately that he was Zeus, king of the gods, and that he had come to partake in Lycaon's hospitality.

Many in Lycaon's household recognized Zeus immediately and quickly dropped to their knees and started worshiping the Olympian.

But King Lycaon was not convinced.

Who was this haughty traveler?

Surely he could not be the real Zeus.

At first, the king simply wanted the man dead, so he plotted to have the visitor quietly done away with while he slept.

But then he got a better idea.

First, he would test this would-be god and see just how powerful he truly was.

So, the Arcadian king ordered that a prisoner be chosen from his dungeons and killed.

The unfortunate inmate was then dismembered, his limbs were stewed, and other bits of his body were mixed into various dishes that were to be served at an elaborate feast.

That evening, Lycaon invited his visitor to dine with him at the king's table.

If the man obliviously ate human flesh, then obviously he was no god, and Lycaon had the added sadistic benefit of knowing that he had tricked a man into cannibalism.

That night the king of Arcadia and the king of the gods sat down together to break bread, but Zeus was in no mood to humor Lycaon.

The moment that the meal containing human flesh was brought to the table, the god rose and revealed himself in all his terrible glory.

Zeus then brought down the roof roof of this corrupted household, reducing the palace to dust.

King Lycaon just managed to escape with his life, but his punishment was not yet over.

The poet Ovid writes of the cursed king, quote, Foaming at the mouth and greedy as ever for killing, he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood.

His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs, he was a wolf, but he kept some vestige of his former shape.

There were the same gray hairs, the same violent face, the same glittering eyes, the same savage image.

Zeus had transformed Lycaon into a horrific hybrid beast, a wolf that was still, somehow, a man.

Was Lycaon the world's first werewolf?

Well,

not technically, but he may have been the most influential.

Stories about human beings transforming into wolves can be found in oral traditions from around the globe dating back millennia.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving piece of literature on the planet, describes the goddess Ishtar transforming one of her hapless human lovers into a wolf.

Clearly, as long as humanity has been telling stories, there have been tales of lupine transformations.

But the story of Lycaon seems to have cast a longer shadow than many of the other wolfman traditions.

King Lycaon has even given his name to the very condition of becoming a werewolf, which is technically known as lycanthropy.

What's fascinating about the transformation of King Lycaon is that Zeus only seems to bring to the surface what has always lurked inside of the king.

The Arcadian ruler was bloodthirsty, violent, and animalistic.

He was a wolfish man.

Zeus only needed to tip the scales ever so slightly to turn him into, well, a mannish wolf.

Perhaps this reveals the deeper horror baked into werewolf mythology, the anxiety that, despite the thin veneer of civilization and human morality, deep down, all of us are still animals.

If not properly tended to, that animal can awaken.

We can lose our sense of self and become violent in ways that we never thought imaginable.

But is that the only explanation for the ancient and robust canon of werewolf lore that exists across cultures?

Are tales of lycanthropy simply manifestations of one of humanity's oldest fears?

Or might they reflect a distant, if blurry, historical memory?

There have been historical eras when werewolves migrated out of the realm of pure folklore and started to be taken seriously by jurists, philosophers, and witch hunters.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, accounts of real werewolves terrorizing the European countryside became increasingly common.

People were accused of lycanthropy by their neighbors, and some even admitted at trial that they could transform into wolves.

How should we explain these allegedly real werewolves?

Is there a compelling psychological explanation for this seemingly wolfish behavior?

Or were criminals using the widespread belief in lycanthropy to explain away their terrible crimes?

Werewolves have been a reliable part of folklore traditions since time immemorial, but over the millennia, the archetype of the wolfman has shifted and changed to suit different historical and cultural contexts.

How has the werewolf evolved since the time of King Lycaon?

Why has this particular monster proved to be so historically durable?

Were there ever real werewolves?

Let's see what we can find out today on our fake history.

Episode number 236, Real Werewolves.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

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This week, we are turning our attention to one of folklore's oldest monsters, the animal-human hybrids known as werewolves or lycanthropes if you prefer the highfalutin title.

Now, as you may know, this podcast usually explores historical myths, which I typically define as misconceptions or fantastic stories that have been wound into the historical record and get passed off as historical facts.

But as longtime listeners know, we often like to flip the script a little bit and instead explore the history of myths.

That means tracing the evolution of various mythological traditions and asking if there's a kernel of historical fact hidden somewhere deep behind the layers of storytelling.

We now have a bit of a subgenre going on this show, which I would call the surprising history of mythological creatures.

We've looked at griffins, mermaids, and now werewolves.

As I mentioned in the introduction, werewolf mythology is both incredibly old and remarkably cross-cultural.

Stories can be found in every corner of the globe that describe human beings transforming into animals.

Sometimes these transformations are voluntary.

The person in question may be a shaman possessed of spiritual powers, a sorcerer, or some type of demigod.

In other instances, the unfortunate person is cursed to become an animal.

Like King Lycaon, this curse may be a form of divine justice, or due to a chance encounter with some dark magic.

Regional variations on this myth also tend to reflect the local animal life.

These monstrous transformations often involve the most feared predators in any given place.

For instance, in India, Thailand, and in many parts of China, half-human, half-tiger creatures, or ware tigers, are abundant in folklore.

Throughout East Africa, there are tales of human beings transforming into lions.

In Tanzania, there's a well-known folk tradition concerning a creature known as the Nunda, a giant cat that stalks the night that is part lion and part leopard.

During the day, the nunda hides in plain sight as a human being.

In European folklore, you can find examples of all sorts of human hybrid creatures, but the wolf has long been given a certain pride of place.

In his book, The White Devil, the Werewolf in European Culture, Archaeologist Matthew Beresford suggests a few reasons why this is the case.

Like tigers, lions, and other other apex predators, wolves are not only dangerous, but they were once competitors for early human hunters.

But unlike other animals, they were one of the few dangerous apex predators to be domesticated by human beings.

You could say that wolves were brought into the fold.

And eventually, some species became man's best friend, domesticated dogs.

The deep bond between human beings and dogs is fairly unique, and this relationship began as an encounter with wild wolves.

The process of domesticating the dog meant breeding out their more dangerous traits, but perhaps an anxiety persisted that the wolf was never truly gone.

Further, Beresford has pointed out that in many pre-Christian European cultures, the wolf acted as a powerful totem that signified martial prowess, courage, and ferocity in battle.

Wolf imagery is especially pronounced in early Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian cultures.

In this way, wolves have long had a contradictory, dual reputation in many European cultures.

On the one hand, they are admired as symbols of strength and loyalty.

On the other, they are are feared as savage, ferocious creatures driven by a terrible hunger.

Werewolf mythology is similarly pulled in those two different directions.

At different points in history, werewolves have been presented in different ways.

Sometimes these human wolf hybrids are mindless, marauding creatures who, like King Lycaon, foam at the mouth as they devour sheep, small animals, or anyone unlucky enough to get in their way.

However, in other werewolf tales, the creature is able to retain more of its humanity.

During the High Middle Ages, much of the werewolf literature focused on noble, sympathetic werewolves who were able to demonstrate their human virtues even while they were in the form of wolves.

Then in the 16th century, the werewolf archetype went through yet another metamorphosis.

In the context of the religious turmoil of that era, werewolves became understood as demonic creatures.

They were either sorcerers transformed or unfortunate souls who had come under the thrall of a witch.

These were not noble creatures, but were instead abominations who had been deluded by Satan and his minions.

In that era, werewolf stories became deeply connected to tales about vampires.

Both monsters had the power to transform.

They attacked the innocent and could only be stopped through the application of the correct supernatural remedies.

In some folklore traditions, these monsters can be hard to tell apart, as vampires are often described as having the ability to transform into wolves.

But, as Matthew Beresford poetically puts it, quote,

Whereas the vampire could be seen as a metaphor for society's fear and fascination with death, the werewolf is the direct opposite.

It is mankind's fear and fascination with life.

It may seem strange to suggest that we fear life, but this precisely and plausibly stems from the notion that we do not yet understand life, that is, what creates life, what causes us to be alive, and whether death ends this life or merely opens up the next stage of life to us.

End quote.

That passage really resonated with me.

The werewolf is not a symbol of death, but rather a wild, unrestrained expression of capital L life.

One of the key attributes that makes a werewolf what it is is its hybrid nature.

A person who becomes a wolf is not necessarily a werewolf.

The wolf creature needs to be at least part human.

That sometimes means a humanoid, bipedal shape, but more commonly, it means that the creature retains a human-like intelligence, emotions, or moral sense.

By the same token, a werewolf in human form always carries the animalistic nature of the wolf with them.

The werewolf is more than just the sum of its parts.

It is capital L life taking on shapes both beautiful and monstrous.

So, let's take a tour of werewolf mythology, with some special attention paid to ancient and medieval werewolf traditions that you may be less familiar with.

I would also like to consider how we should understand people people from the past who claimed that they were real werewolves.

Was this ancient monster so deeply planted in the human subconscious that it was only a matter of time before people started to believe that they were truly transforming by moonlight?

Let's see what we can find out.

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In the world of ancient mythology, animal-human hybrid creatures are a dime a dozen.

Many ancient polytheistic religions featured deities that combined human and animal characteristics.

Take, for example, the ancient Egyptians who worshipped the falcon-headed god Horus, Thoth, the god of culture with his long-billed ibis head, and of course, Anubis, the jackal-headed god who guided the dead to the afterlife.

Now, I wouldn't call Anubis a werewolf, but it is interesting that the human-canine hybrid was deeply associated with funerary rites, cemeteries, and the border between life and death.

Those interesting connections aside, werewolves have never really been given the exalted status of gods.

In mythology, they have more in common with creatures like centaurs or fawns, hybrid creatures who are powerful but aren't quite divine.

Werewolf lore seems to be connected to a larger mythological tradition that involves human beings being transformed into animals as a punishment from the gods.

In Greek myth, we have the story of Actaeon, the hunter who sees the goddess Artemis bathing naked and is transformed into a stag by the goddess and then hunted by his own dogs.

There's also the tale of Hecuba, who was transformed into a fiery-eyed dog after avenging the death of her slain son.

In many ways, the story of King Lycaon and his divine punishment at the hands of Zeus fits nicely with those stories.

In all of those cases, there's a certain poetry to the justice being meted out by the gods.

The hunter becomes the hunted.

The loyal mother becomes a perverted symbol of loyalty.

The bloodthirsty king becomes a literal wolf man.

But by the time we get to the Roman era, the werewolf metamorphosis seems to have been placed in a slightly different category than other divinely aided transformations.

You see, in the world of werewolf lore, King Lycaon is a bit of an outlier, as his transformation is brought about by a god.

In many werewolf stories, the metamorphosis into the wolf creature occurs by means of dark magic, or because of some type of inherited trait.

Now, the Romans had an interesting cultural connection to wolves.

The two mythological founders of the city of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were famously saved from exposure as infants by a she-wolf who allowed the babies to feed off her like they were wolf pups.

This story story was often used as an allegory to help explain Rome's military aggressiveness.

The Romans were raised by wolves and remained temperamentally wolfish.

But the first proper werewolf story to appear in Roman literature after Ovid's take on King Lycaon appears around 60 AD in a book called The Satiricon of Petronius Arbiter.

The book is a body collection of comical, poignant, and sometimes bizarre stories that often act as a type of social commentary.

Now, one section of the book details a long dinner party where the guests trade wild stories.

One of these stories is provided by a former slave named Niceros.

Niceros explains that on one night when, quote, the moon was shining as bright as day, end quote he was traveling to meet his sweetheart and was accompanied by a roman soldier the two decided to stop for a break in a graveyard and the soldier used the opportunity to sneak away from his companion

curious niceros followed the soldier and watched from a hiding place as the man took off all his clothes placed them in a pile urinated in a circle around them transformed into a wolf and then ran off into the woods.

When Niceros investigated the clothes, he discovered that they had all been turned to stone.

He then ran as fast as he could to his final destination, his sweetheart's farmhouse.

When he got there, the young woman told him that he had just missed a terrible scene.

A giant wolf had come out of nowhere, broke into the farm, and had slaughtered all the cattle, quote, as if the butcher had bled them, end quote.

But one brave farm worker had saved the day when he grabbed a pike and ran it through the wolf's neck, sending the beast whimpering back into the woods.

The next day, Niceros returned home, where he discovered his soldier companion stricken in bed, with a surgeon dressing a nasty bleeding wound on his neck.

Any doubts that Niceros may have had that this soldier was the wolf that attacked the farm of his lady were now dashed.

This man was clearly a werewolf, and as Niceros told the guests at dinner, quote, I could never afterwards eat bread with him, end quote.

I kind of love the ending to that story.

The guy discovers that his friend is a ravening beast and he's like,

dude, I'm not sure if I can do lunch tomorrow.

Maybe we just cancel lunch.

That cool with you?

Anyway, this story in the Satyricon is significant as it establishes a handful of werewolf storytelling tropes that persist to this very day.

First, we have the moonlit night.

Now, interestingly, the idea that a werewolf only transforms during a full moon only became a consistent part of werewolf mythology many centuries later.

I'd like to come back to that, so let's just put a pin in that for now.

But this story from the Satyricon with the quote moon shining as bright as day, end quote, may be the germ of those later traditions.

Next, there's an interesting connection between the werewolf's transformation and a ritual involving their human clothes.

The idea that a werewolf's human clothes are deeply connected to their metamorphosis will continue to reappear in werewolf stories deep into the medieval and early modern periods.

Then there's the trope of the so-called sympathetic wound.

This is when the creature is wounded while in beast form, and then the same injury appears on them when they have returned to their their human shape.

Now, the question is: how seriously did people take stories like these in the Roman period?

After all, the Satyricon was a work of fiction meant for entertainment.

To get a better sense of how werewolves were understood in the Roman world, we should instead turn to an old favorite of the Our Fake History podcast, Pliny the Elder.

In the monumental work The Naturalis Historia, or the Natural History, from 77 AD, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder took time to specifically speak on the werewolf phenomenon as a distinct type of metamorphosis.

As both long-time listeners and Roman history buffs know, the natural history was an expansive work that sought to compile all the accepted wisdom on geography, biology, geology, astronomy, mathematics, and more available to the Romans.

In many ways, it was the world's first encyclopedia.

In the Historia, Pliny notes that there are many werewolf stories specifically from the region of Greece that, legend tells us, was once ruled by King Lycaon, Arcadia.

Pliny tells his readers that there is a well-known belief that the Arcadians remained cursed with a type of lycanthropy.

He writes that every nine years a member of the Arcadian community

is chosen by lot and taken to a certain lake in that district, where after suspending his clothes on an oak, he swims across the water and goes away into the desert, where he transforms into a wolf and associates with other animals of that species for nine years.

If he has kept himself from beholding a man during the whole of that time, he returns to that same lake and after swimming across it assumes his original form, only with the addition of nine years to his former condition.

This story of a scapegoat enduring a transformation for the good of his community is fascinating.

You may have noticed that once again, the ritual involved in the transformation includes a specific way that the werewolf's human clothes are to be dealt with.

But Pliny was fairly skeptical of these werewolf tales.

He writes, quote, tales that men have been turned into wolves and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue, unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales which for so many ages have been found to be fabulous.

⁇

Now, I think it's notable that Pliny was so dismissive of werewolves, because there are so many things in his natural history that modern folks might find totally bonkers, that he thinks are completely reasonable.

For instance, Pliny is unbothered by reports of tritons and other myrrh people.

He also talks about griffins living in Ethiopia, along with other fantastical creatures.

But werewolves, well, that's a bridge too far for our man Pliny the Elder.

So, what does this tell us?

Well, clearly, a folk belief in werewolves persisted in Greece, especially in Arcadia for many centuries.

But by the first century AD, Roman experts were becoming skeptical of this particular monster.

Now, if we move forward in time and north of the Mediterranean, we get a different take on the wolfman archetype.

In pagan Germanic culture, wolves were often presented as fearsome but admirable creatures.

In this cultural context, taking on the attributes of a wolf was not always considered a bad thing.

Again, I'll quote Matthew Beresford, who's pointed out that in a number of pagan Germanic cultures, you can find rituals and totemic objects that were meant to, quote, pass the power of the wolf to man.

This is not a belief in a physical transformation into a wolf, but rather a metaphorical one, end quote.

The largely positive feeling towards wolves in these cultures is even reflected in the prevalence of the word wolf or wolf in Germanic names.

The Anglo-Saxons had names like Wolfstand or Seinwolf, which translates to something like Wolf King.

The most famous Anglo-Saxon hero was, of course, Beowulf.

This fascination with the power of the wolf continued into what we now think of as the Viking Age.

The mytho-historical Viking texts known as the sagas famously make reference to wild, animalistic warriors known as berserkers, and the even more enigmatic Ulfhochnir, or wolfskins.

And apologies to all my Scandinavian listeners who are cringing at my pronunciations.

That's the best I could do.

Now, saying anything for certain about this legendary group of warriors is difficult.

The sagas are famously complicated texts to parse.

Most of these texts were written in Iceland a few hundred years after the events they claim to chronicle throughout Scandinavia.

The sagas mix history, mythology, poetry, and oral tradition in ways that are often beautiful, but not always historically reliable.

Now, this doesn't mean that the sagas are useless as historical sources.

It just means that they need to be handled with care.

The sagas speak of a group of warriors dedicated to the god Odin, who, potentially using psychotropic substances, worked themselves into a chaotic battle frenzy where they no longer felt pain.

The word berserker, which is often used for these Viking shock troops, has been translated as bear shirts, which fits with descriptions of these warriors wearing bear skins over their armor.

Burials in Sweden and Norway dating from the Viking Age have been found with the deceased clothed in bear skin or decorated with bear teeth and claws.

Now, I should say that this interpretation is contested.

There are some who believe that the term berserker refers to the fact that these warriors were bare-chested and wore no chainmail armor or any type of animal hides.

The jury is still out on this one.

But according to one of the sagas, a subset of these berserker warriors were known as, quote, Ulfhechnir, who wore wolfskin over their mail coats, end quote.

Both these bearskin and wolfskin warriors were said to go through an animalistic transformation as they prepared for battle.

The medieval medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus described the warriors like this: quote, Their eyes glared as though a flame burned in their sockets.

They ground their teeth, frothed at the mouth, they gnawed their shield rims, and are said to have sometimes bitten through.

As they rushed into battle, they yelped as dogs or howled as wolves.

End quote.

So, were the berserkers and the wolfskins the real werewolves of history?

It is very tempting to make this connection.

If these wolfskins existed the way that one Nordic saga describes, then there may have been a feared group of warriors who dressed as wolves and metaphorically and psychologically transformed themselves into some sort of human-animal hybrid.

I mean, that really sounds like a werewolf, doesn't it?

Could it be that the real historical memory of berserkers and wolfskins inspired later tales of werewolves?

Well, it is clear that the wolf warriors made their way into Nordic folklore.

For instance, take the trope of the wolf hide belt in Scandinavian storytelling.

The folklorist Niels Lid has pointed out that in many Scandinavian storytelling traditions, there are tales of men and women putting on enchanted wolf skin belts and using them to transform into wolves.

This folk belief seems to have persisted well into the 16th century.

In that era, witch trials that took place in Norway often included questions about enchanted wolf belts.

Owning a wolf belt was thought to be evidence that the person in question was a witch.

The Icelandic Volsong saga also includes a tale of lycanthropy.

That text tells the story of two Viking Age men named Sigmund and Sinthjotli, a father and son team who head into the woods to test their strength.

They eventually come upon a small hut where they find two sleeping men whose clothes seem to suggest that they are sorcerers.

Hanging nearby their beds were two large wolf skins.

Sigmund and his son grabbed the skins and put them on their backs.

As soon as the skins were on, the men began to feel like wolves, and they started to howl.

They soon discovered that the wolf skins had fused with their bodies and would not come off.

They had become strange hybrid creatures, more wolf than man, but not entirely animal.

The two then set out to satisfy their bloodlust, believing that if they killed enough people, the spell might be broken and they would regain their humanity.

When they came upon a group of travelers, Sinfjotli attacked first and killed all eleven of them.

This enraged Sigmund, who had wanted the two to attack together and share the kills.

A fight broke out between the two wolfmen, and Sigmund mortally wounded his son, nearly killing him.

Luckily, the god Odin intervened.

The god sent a raven with a magical herb that both revived the wounded Sinfjotli and freed the two men from their cursed wolf hides.

So, what does this story tell us?

Well, there was clearly a folkloric belief in wolf magic in Viking society.

Wolf skins were thought to have some sort of totemic power.

The tale of Sigmund and Synth Jotli could potentially be read as a cautionary tale for warriors who use this wolf magic or go on the so-called wolf ride.

And I love that.

Hey, tonight, you want to go on a wolf ride?

If you transform yourself either literally or metaphorically into an animal, you run the risk of remaining a beast permanently.

The hard question to answer here is whether or not the Viking wolf warrior was purely an invention of folklore.

Did wolfskin-clad shock troops really exist and inspire these werewolf stories?

There is some evidence for that, but there doesn't seem to be a strong consensus among the experts.

It would be very fun if I could say something bold and catchy like, Viking berserkers were the real werewolves,

but that would be a little irresponsible.

After all, it's very clear that Viking warriors from the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries did not inspire werewolf tales from ancient Greece and Rome.

Germanic tales about wolf magic and human transformations likely meshed with earlier Mediterranean traditions and evolved into medieval and then modern werewolf stories.

But as Europe moved into the medieval era, something interesting happened to the werewolf.

The ancient werewolf and the Viking shapeshifter were both presented as fearsome, violent creatures.

Even in the Germanic tradition, where wolves were considered more admirable, stories of wolf men and wolf women were always violent.

The medieval werewolf was something different.

This beast could be presented as noble, sympathetic, and victimized.

Starting in the 12th century, we see a rash of new werewolf stories appearing in the literature produced in France and England.

The medievalist Carolyn Walker Bynum has called this the, quote, werewolf renaissance of the 12th century.

So, what was this werewolf renaissance?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we will explore the phenomenon of the romantic werewolf.

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The late 1100s were a particularly culturally fertile moment in European history, especially in France and England.

Now, we have spoken about this time and place before on this podcast, because this was the era of the famous and much mythologized female ruler Eleanor of Aquitaine and her husband, King Henry II of England.

The courts of their so-called Angevin Empire, which combined Eleanor's vast holdings in the southwest of France and Henry's English kingdom, became well known for their patronage of the arts.

Eleanor in particular became known as a patron of poets and balladeers, who encouraged the growth of new styles of romance literature.

The work of poets like Chrétien de Trois was defined by an evolving understanding of chivalry, courtly love, and heroic virtue.

Many of the most memorable King Arthur stories were produced in this period in the context of these courts.

But so too were a fascinating clutch of werewolf stories.

The French literary expert Leslie Sconduto has proposed that this so-called werewolf renaissance can be explained by a few different factors.

She writes, quote, among those factors influencing werewolf narratives, we can include the 12th century's fascination with constancy and changeability of identity, the church's doctrine of metamorphosis as an illusion, and its insistence on the rational nature of human beings.

the appropriation of the marvelous in courtly romance, and the usefulness of the werewolf as an ironic metaphor.

End quote.

Okay, let's unpack that a little.

Sconduto argues that much of 12th century literature was concerned with the virtue of constancy, that is, staying true to your king, your lord, your family, or your true love.

Lycanthropy, a werewolf transformation, can be used as the ultimate test of one's constancy.

Can a a human being remain constant as a wolf?

Can others remain constant to a werewolf?

Also, the werewolves of the 12th century are transformed in ways that are mainly superficial.

The transformation does not affect the soul of the person within.

And in fact, becoming a werewolf provides an opportunity for the afflicted person to prove their virtue.

A great example of this kind of werewolf story can be found in a narrative poem known as a lay by one of the best-known female poets of this era.

The author was a woman living at the English court composing in French who has become known to history as Marie de France.

One of her narrative poems or lays as they were known was titled Bis Clavre.

Now, scholars will debate the etymology of that particular word, but it's often simply translated as a synonym for werewolf.

Bisclavre is the werewolf.

In the poem we are introduced to a knight who is noble and true.

He was adored by his neighbors, trusted by his king, and loved by his wife.

However, his wife became suspicious after her husband started disappearing for days at a time.

Believing that her husband may have a secret mistress, she decided to confront him.

After much cajoling, the knight admitted that he had a secret that he worried might destroy his life.

But he was not having an affair.

He was a bisclavre, a werewolf.

Once a week, he would get naked in the woods, hide his clothes, transform into a wolf, and hunt animals for three days until eventually he was able to return to his human form.

Shocked, the woman first feigned understanding, but then secretly started to plot against her husband, who she now feared deeply.

The next time her husband took off to transform into a beast, she sent a messenger to another knight who had long desired her.

She told the man that if he went and retrieved her husband's clothes from their hiding place in the forest, she would leave her husband and become his lover.

The man located her husband's clothes and stole them.

This magically trapped the Bisclavray in his wolf form.

A year passed with the knight living as a wolf, but he never fully lost his human identity.

Then one day he spotted the king riding through the woods on a hunting expedition.

At first, the king's party was sent into a state of alarm when they noticed a giant wolf approaching them.

But they were quickly amazed when the wolf started licking the hands of the king and making what seemed to be the formal signs of submission.

He was like a knight paying homage to his lord.

Impressed with the wolf's courtly manners, the king made him his personal pet.

So it was that the Bisclavray was welcomed to court, where he served the king faithfully as any knight for many months.

While in the king's service, the werewolf never once had a savage or violent outburst.

He was as chivalrous and kind as anyone at court.

That was until the day he saw the man who had married his treacherous wife.

The knight was visiting court when the king's faithful Bisclavray shocked onlookers when he pounced on the man and began to bite him ferociously.

A word from the king quickly ended the attack, but something was amiss.

Bisclavre had earned the king's trust.

Why had this random knight inspired such violence?

Then, a few days later, the king and his party came across the knight's wife on a forest trail, and and once again Bisclavray attacked.

When the king learned that this woman was married to Bisclavray's first victim, he became very suspicious.

So the woman was taken in and questioned, which in medieval speak means tortured, and she confessed to everything.

She recognized the wolf as her former husband and explained the whole sorry tale.

The stolen clothes were returned to the werewolf knight and at last he was able to retake his human form.

Interesting story, right?

Now, the villain in Marie de France's poem is not the werewolf, but is instead an unfaithful woman.

The werewolf is given all sorts of opportunities to demonstrate that he still has a human soul.

As Leslie Sconduto points out, this helps the story fit within the medieval Christian understanding of metamorphosis.

It was believed that only God could truly transform matter, and werewolves were clearly not godly creations.

As such, the transformation is presented as superficial and illusory.

This story is also filled with old sexist tropes about the corrupting nature of women.

The werewolf is ultimately more constant than his changeable wife.

This could be read as a jab at women generally and fits with prevailing medieval stereotypes concerning feminine frailty.

Now, usually, Marie de France is noted for her sympathetic portrayals of women in her work.

It's no small thing that she was a female artist creating in the 12th century.

But the negative cultural narratives about women ran deep in the medieval era.

You could argue they still do.

And they can certainly be found in this poem.

By contrasting a changeable, unfaithful female character with a literal werewolf, the poet seems to be making an ironic point.

As the scholar Michelle Freeman has argued, the wife in the poem is the quote-unquote real werewolf because she has quote devoured the human being who was her husband, end quote.

That's an interesting take.

This archetype of the chivalrous werewolf demonstrating his knightly humanity despite his monstrous transformation would appear again in a number of other narratives from the 12th century.

Many of these werewolf stories were folded into the Arthurian myth cycle.

So, if you were wondering if there's ever been a King Arthur werewolf crossover event,

I'm here to tell you that there's been more than one.

In a poetic lay known as Melion, a knight by that name who serves King Arthur is transformed into a werewolf by way of a magic ring after being tricked by, you guessed it, an unfaithful woman.

Much like the Bisclavray story, this wolf knight impresses King Arthur with his courtly manners.

The woman is then discovered, along with the ring, and Melion is able to return to his human shape.

This trope returns again in the 13th century, where we find the tale of King Arthur and Gorlagon.

In this story, a king named Gorlagon is turned into a wolf by way of a magical sapling.

Once again, the werewolf is betrayed by his unfaithful wife who discovers his secret, steals a magical branch from the tree, and tries to permanently rid herself of her husband by turning him into a wolf with the mind of a man.

As Leslie Sconduto has pointed out, in all three of these stories, the werewolf is used as an ironic metaphor.

He is physically the most changed, but is temperamentally and spiritually the most constant.

The werewolf is an admirable character who demonstrates to the reader that loyalty to one's lord and good courtly manners are more important than any physical hardship you may be experiencing.

Like the werewolf, your constancy will be your salvation.

Now, it could be argued that the portrayal of werewolves in medieval literature suggests that at that time, the belief in the reality of werewolves was less intense than it would become in later periods.

In these medieval poems, the werewolf is an allegorical figure and not necessarily a real threat that stalks the forests at night.

The 12th century may have given us a werewolf renaissance, but ironically, it was during the actual renaissance of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries when belief in real werewolves reached its peak in European society.

Now, this is one of my favorite quirks of history rearing its head once again.

One of the most common historical misconceptions is that the medieval period was a dark age shrouded in superstitions that Europeans finally emerged from during the so-called Renaissance.

The truth is, frankly, far more messy.

As we've seen before on this podcast, popular belief in witches, dark magic, creatures like mermaids, and yes, werewolves actually became more acute in the era where the scientific method was emerging and reason and rationality were allegedly becoming society's guiding virtues.

The belief in real werewolves went hand in hand with the witch panics that swept through Europe and her colonies in the 16th and 17th centuries.

In this context, the archetype of the admirable werewolf, who can teach us all a few things about courtly manners, went out the window.

Instead, the historical sources from this period seem to revive the more ancient understanding of the creature, that being a violent killer overcome by animalistic urges.

In the sixteenth century werewolves were believed to have been bewitched by people in league with the devil.

This meant that werewolves were either witches or were the hapless victims of witches.

In the infamous sixteenth century witch hunting text the Malleus Maleficarum, the author argues that not only are witches real, they have the power to transform themselves, or at least can conjure illusions that make it seem like they are transformed.

Further, he insists that denying the existence of witches or any of their powers is tantamount to heresy.

As Leslie Sconduto argues, quote, his treaties not only made belief in werewolves permissible, but also made this belief mandatory for those Christians who did not want to be accused of blasphemy or heresy, end quote.

Accordingly, we see an uptick in werewolf stories appearing in historical sources, except now they're not being presented as ironic metaphors.

They are real reports of strange occurrences.

For instance, in a French witch-hunting text from 1602, the author Henri Bouger recounts a tale that allegedly took place in 1588.

According to Bouget, in that year a huntsman in the French region of Auvain had a strange encounter with a wolf.

While on a hunting expedition, the man was attacked out of nowhere by a giant wolf.

He tried to shoot the beast with his archebus, but it had little effect.

The wolf kept coming, and soon the huntsman found himself grappling hand-to-hand with the animal.

Eventually, the man managed to get hold of his hunting knife and cut the paw off the creature, which finally forced the wolf to retreat.

After the harrowing ordeal, the hunter made his way back to a friend's nearby lodge.

There he told the story of the fight with the wolf and reached into his bag to show his friend the enormous paw that he had cut off the animal.

But when he reached for the paw, he instead pulled out a severed human hand.

What's more, the hand was wearing a gold ring that the huntsman's host recognized as belonging to his wife.

They then tracked down the woman and discovered her nursing a bleeding stump where her hand had once been.

The sympathetic wound had given her away.

She then confessed to being a werewolf, and, according to Bouger, a few days later she was burned as a witch.

Now, this tale really feels like a historical myth.

It's filled with folkloric tropes.

We have the tell-tale sympathetic wound.

Even the character of the disloyal wife seems to be borrowed from the medieval werewolf romances.

But Bouger presents this as a trustworthy account that he was told by an unnamed man who had traveled to Auvergne.

Now, while Bouger presents this particular story fairly credulously, he does spend time in his book debating whether or not this type of transformation is technically possible.

He eventually concludes that, quote, it has always been my opinion that lycanthropy is an illusion and that metamorphosis from man to beast is impossible, end quote.

He believes that witches exist and can convince people that they are wolves, but this is merely a glamorizing spell.

That huntsman only thought he was fighting a wolf.

In Bouget's estimation, he was actually fighting a witch who had cast an illusion.

Bouget was not alone in this assessment of the werewolf phenomenon.

Just a few years later, in 1605, the English writer Richard Rowlands published his historical work, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, where he says this about werewolves, quote,

The werewolves are certain sorcerers who, having anointed their bodies with an ointment which they make by instinct of the devil, and putting on a certain enchanted girdle, do not only on the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear said girdle.

End quote.

Now I found that description fascinating.

Like Bouger, Roland believes that werewolves don't truly transform so much as they use magic to create an illusion.

Roland's description seems to echo the stories of the Viking wolf skins.

The magical girdle he describes sounds an awful lot like the enchanted wolf belts of Scandinavian folklore.

He also includes the detail about a magical werewolf ointment.

which is really a must for this coming Halloween season.

Everyone, don't forget to whip up a batch of werewolf ointment.

But what's interesting is that this combination of ointment and girdle not only deludes others into thinking the sorcerer is a wolf, the sorcerer himself believes he is a wolf.

This too seems to echo the tales of the wolfskins indulging in intoxicants to make themselves more animalistic before battle.

So while the Renaissance werewolf was considered real, it was becoming the opinion of learned folks that the werewolf's transformation was actually a magical illusion.

Werewolves were people who believed themselves to be wolves and through magic convinced other people to share in this delusion.

The idea of the deluded werewolf would eventually come to dominate discussions of the beast.

In the 16th century, there were a handful of very disturbing crimes where the people responsible would confess to being werewolves.

In 1521, two men named Pierre Bourgaux and Michel Verdon went on a horrific killing spree in the French countryside.

The men attacked at least eight young children, killing them and in some cases eating parts of their body.

At trial, trial, the men would confess to having put on werewolf ointment, transforming themselves into wolves and committing their crimes while in animal form.

At the time, this confession was in keeping with popular thoughts on witchcraft, and so the confessions were accepted and the men were burnt at the stake.

A similar case took place in France in 1574.

In that year, one Gilles Garnier confessed to killing and eating four children, sometimes in the form of a wolf and sometimes in the form of a man.

Then in 1598, another serial killer and cannibal, a man named Jacques Roulet, claimed that he had committed his crimes after attending a witch's Sabbath and transforming into a werewolf.

At first, the confessed werewolf was given the death sentence.

However, the Parlement of Paris eventually commuted this sentence to two years in an insane asylum.

At the turn of the 17th century, there was still a widespread belief in the power of witchcraft, but creeping in was the belief that mental illness might be an explanation for werewolf behavior.

The judges in this case did not think that roulet had literally become a wolf, but they were willing to consider that he had truly believed that he was a wolf.

Whether or not this was due to black magic or what they would have understood as a form of insanity was up for debate.

In this particular case, Roulet was treated as a madman and not as a sorcerer.

In this era, an emerging understanding of mental illness co-mingled with a persistent belief in witchcraft.

Werewolf cases from the 1600s lived in this strange gray area of European thinking.

As such, it's hard to know what was exactly going on in those cases.

But, interestingly, modern psychologists have identified a condition that's known as clinical lycanthropy.

This is a very rare psychiatric condition where someone suffers from the delusion that they can transform into a wolf or any other animal for that matter.

Over the last 50 years, a number of clinical lycanthropy cases have been closely studied.

Experts now believe that cultural inputs can often affect the delusions that people have.

Wolf delusions are more common in Europe and North America.

In Japan, cases of clinical lycanthropy often involve people that believe they can transform into foxes or kitsune.

The theory goes that this is because foxes have more cultural significance in Japan than wolves.

Now, often this phenomenon is associated with other psychiatric conditions.

Clinical lycanthropy is usually understood as a psychotic episode associated with dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or clinical depression.

So, someone who is dealing with an underlying psychiatric condition that might cause delusional thinking may believe that they can transform into an animal.

Now, One of the more recent cases of clinical lycanthropy to make the news was a shocking 2016 double homicide in Florida, where a 19-year-old brutally attacked a man and a woman and was found by police snarling like a dog and chewing on one of his victims' faces.

Leading up to the episode, the young man had apparently told his family members that he believed that he was either half horse or half dog.

Now, at first, it was assumed that this strange attack had been fueled by the dangerous designer drug known as bath salts, but a toxicology report later ruled that out.

He was later diagnosed by a psychologist as having experienced clinical lycanthropy.

In many ways, this bizarre crime seems to echo those French werewolf cases from the 16th century.

Could those men have also been suffering from what we now call clinical lycanthropy?

It's certainly possible.

Those 16th century men lived in a culture where belief in werewolves was common.

This may have given fodder to their psychotic delusions.

As we saw with the tale of the huntsmen of Auveil, a widespread belief in werewolves can make even fantastical stories seem reasonable.

Dissociative psychological episodes may have had more of a werewolf flavor in this period, thanks to a culture steeped in witch paranoia and werewolf fears.

But, of course,

that is just a guess.

What is clear is that as European culture moved out of the era of witchcraft panics, the language around the werewolf phenomena became more medical.

While thinkers in the 1600s were skeptical of real, physical werewolf transformations, they entertained the idea that convincing werewolf illusions could be created by magical ointments and enchanted girdles.

By the mid-1700s, it was becoming more widely accepted that anyone who claimed to be a werewolf had only deluded themselves.

As time and scientific understanding progressed, quote-unquote, real werewolves all but disappeared.

But of course, the werewolf archetype did not vanish from the world of folklore and fiction.

The werewolf mythos continued to evolve through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Many of the elements that we now see as completely central to the werewolf myth only seem to have entered the scene once Hollywood got a hold of the story.

Arguably, one of the most important werewolf texts ever is the 1941 Universal Studios horror classic, The Wolfman, starring Lon Cheney Jr.

The distinctive furry wolf makeup in that film would do much to enshrine the modern vision of the bipedal werewolf.

But beyond that, the idea that someone can only become a werewolf once they are bitten by a werewolf was popularized by the 1941 film.

The idea that lycanthropy is a type of infection transferred by a bite is, historically speaking, a very new idea.

It seems likely that this trope was simply borrowed from vampire mythology.

I'm sure that some of you have noticed that I've been speaking about werewolves for more than an hour now, and I haven't once mentioned silver bullets.

That's because silver bullets were a fairly late addition to werewolf mythology.

Now there'd long been a folkloric belief that silver had the power to ward off evil, but once again it was the 1941 film The Wolfman that popularized the idea that only silver weapons could stop a werewolf.

But notably, in The Wolfman, the titular villain is not shot with a silver bullet.

He's instead bludgeoned to death with a cane with a silver wolf's head hilt.

Now, I mentioned earlier that we'd eventually be coming back to the question of the full moon.

When did the full moon become such an essential part of werewolf mythology?

Well, it turns out it was not until the Wolfman's campy sequel, 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, where it was made clear that a werewolf's transformation only happens during a full moon.

I know, that one feels like it should be way more ancient, but it actually comes from Frankenstein meets the wolfman.

Wolfbite infections, full moons, and silver bullets are now considered essential elements of werewolf lore.

But all of them are less than 100 years old and come from Hollywood.

But perhaps this is why the werewolf myth has survived the centuries.

This very ancient monster is defined by its ability to transform.

Over the course of history, the werewolf has moved between the worlds of fact and fiction.

It has transformed from a potent warrior's totem to an ironic metaphor for constancy, to a real threat to society, to a paranoid delusion.

This ability to change has kept the werewolf alive as a storytelling convention.

But you know me.

I'm a traditionalist.

In my book, the only real werewolves are the dudes slathered with ointment.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore another historical myth.

If you had any questions that came to mind during today's episode, then please send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

Or if you are a patron, head to the chat specific to this episode and drop your question there.

I will be answering these questions on a future bonus episode.

Also, I want to remind everyone that I'm going to Greece.

Yes, the Our Fake History community is going to Greece in September of 2026.

It's going to be an incredible, all-inclusive tour that will take us from Athens to Crete to Santorini.

We're going to be hitting historical sites.

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It's going to be a blast.

So, if you would like to join me in Greece in 2026, then go to johnshorestravel.com slash upcoming trips, or even easier go to ourfakehistory.com and follow the links for the trip itinerary.

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Now, normally at this point, I do my Patreon shout-outs.

I'm actually going to hold off on them for this week.

So for those of you that have recently pledged on Patreon, listen again in two weeks' time and I will be shouting you out then.

In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with me, as I said earlier, you can send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

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Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four,

there's nothing better than a welcome sight.

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And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.